Oracle Blog

Kedar Mhaswade's Weblog

A strong case for <a seref="search string">?

This is of course a wacky idea and the one which search engines might/should jump on . I checked the working draft for HTML 5 and could not find it there.

The idea is about search engines aiding all the HTML documents that are about a certain topic and want to intersperse hyper-links to certain terms that appear elsewhere on the web. Of course, I, as an author of a document that references such concepts or terms, don't want to waste time on finding the exact web-page that demonstrates it. The intent of such a link is to provide more information about that term anyway. Then, why not have a facility like:

<a seref="Effective Java">Effective Java</a>

which will bring the page from your favorite search engine with "Effective Java" as your query string.

This is useful for the author because when the author does not really want to be specific to point to a known document, s/he can always make use of search engines which are supposed to provide more up-to-date information on a topic of general interest. More importantly, it examines if search relevance that search engines tout about is any good!

I told ya -- it is wacky , but I just implemented this in my previous post.